All Publications

Accent in Serbocroatian: An Experimental Study

I. Lehiste, Ivic, P.

From the Introduction: This paper constitutes the second in a series of reports describing the results of an acoustic-phonetic investigation of the phonetic and phonemic nature of the accents in Modern Standard Serbocroatian.* The purpose of the investigation is threefold: to establish the phonetic nature of the so-called word accents in Modern Standard Serbocroatian(1), to describe the interrelationships Between the word accents and sentence intonation, and to provide a structural-linguistic interpretation of the observed phenomena. The first report (2) dealt mainly with...

Alphabet

Vitezslav Nezval

Alphabet by Vítězslav Nezval (1900-1959) is widely recognized today as a consummate Czech contribution to European modernism and a unique distillation of the creative spirit of the 1920’s. Published originally in 1926, it is a composite of experimental poetry, modern dance, and photomontage typography, by the poet Vítězslav Nezval, dancer Milča Mayerová, and typographer Karel Teige. This idiosyncratic and idiomatic work transports the reader-viewer through the discipline and fantasy of the modern age. The contributions of Karel Teige, the leading spokesperson for Devĕtsil and avant-garde...

Archpriest Avvakum: The LIFE written by Himself

Brostrom, K.

During the three decades between Nikon's elevation to the patriarchate (July 1652) and the execution by fire of the prisoners of Pustozersk, including Avvakum (April 1682), the Archpriest's influence and fame grew steadily among those committed to the old rituals. He was thirty-one in 1652, simply one among several outstanding clerics from the younger generation who had impressed Neronov and Vonifat'ev by their piety, force of personality, and devotion to spiritual renewal. Thirty years later he was considered a saint by many; he had become the authoritative doctrinal arbiter among the dissenters...

Cinema All the Time: An Anthology of Czech Film Theory and Criticism

Andel, J. and Szczepanik, P.

This anthology assembles some of the earliest Czech texts on film published in the period between 1908 and 1939, i.e., between the rise of art cinema and the outbreak of World War II, writings that were instrumental in shaping various ways film was seen and understood in this formative period.

The anthology is organized both thematically and chronologically to reflect the rise of film as a new medium, a cultural institution, and an art form—in other words, to document the discursive construction of film in its variety and multiplicity. The writings express a number of concerns...

Colors

Weil, J.

Jirí Weil (1900-1959) belongs among those Czech authors whose work has been available to the American reader in English translation only since the early 1990’s. His major novels, Life with the Star and Mendelssohn is on the Roof, have been widely acclaimed as masterful and highly personal accounts of the fate of the Czech Jews during World War II.

The present edition is a translation of a little-known collection of short pieces originally published in 1946. Weil is preoccupied not only with the fate of Jews, but with the entire spectrum of wartime society. His...

Comenius

Busek, V.

Comenius (born March 28, 1592, died November 15, 1670) was a genius, recognized as such even in his lifetime all over the world. He was an extremely prolific scholar, and numerous studies have been written about him in the past three hundred years. He was a pioneer of modern education an some of his ideas have yet to be put into effect. His noble plans to establish a universal educational system, to lead all nations towards peace, truth, and the principles of the Christian rule "Love Thy Neighbor" remain the unfulfilled ideals of mankind to this day.

Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture #01

Various

This annual contains mainly literary works of poetry, biography, prose, but also some papers on philosophy, politics, ideology originating in East Central Europe.

Cross Currents brings the cultural uniqueness and contemporary relevance of Central Europe to the English reader. It addresses a wide variety of topics pertinent to literature, culture and history of Austria, the Baltic countries, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania, and the Ukraine. Published annually from 1982-1989, each issue contains over 400 pages of poetry, prose, interviews and essays....

Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture #03

Matejka L, & Stolz B.A.

This annual contains mainly literary works of poetry, biography, prose, but also some papers on philosophy, politics, ideology originating in East Central Europe.

Cross Currents brings the cultural uniqueness and contemporary relevance of Central Europe to the English reader. It addresses a wide variety of topics pertinent to literature, culture and history of Austria, the Baltic countries, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania, and the Ukraine. Published annually from 1982-1989, each issue contains over 400 pages of poetry, prose, interviews and essays....

Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture #06

Various

This annual contains mainly literary works of poetry, biography, prose, but also some papers on philosophy, politics, ideology originating in East Central Europe.

Cross Currents brings the cultural uniqueness and contemporary relevance of Central Europe to the English reader. It addresses a wide variety of topics pertinent to literature, culture and history of Austria, the Baltic countries, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania, and the Ukraine. Published annually from 1982-1989, each issue contains over 400 pages of poetry, prose, interviews and essays....

Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture #07

Various

This annual contains mainly literary works of poetry, biography, prose, but also some papers on philosophy, politics, ideology originating in East Central Europe.

Cross Currents brings the cultural uniqueness and contemporary relevance of Central Europe to the English reader. It addresses a wide variety of topics pertinent to literature, culture and history of Austria, the Baltic countries, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania, and the Ukraine. Published annually from 1982-1989, each issue contains over 400 pages of poetry, prose, interviews and essays....

Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture #08

Various

This annual contains mainly literary works of poetry, biography, prose, but also some papers on philosophy, politics, ideology originating in East Central Europe.

Cross Currents brings the cultural uniqueness and contemporary relevance of Central Europe to the English reader. It addresses a wide variety of topics pertinent to literature, culture and history of Austria, the Baltic countries, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania, and the Ukraine. Published annually from 1982-1989, each issue contains over 400 pages of poetry, prose, interviews and essays....

The present collection is based on papers presented at the Workshop on Functional categories in Slavic Syntax organized by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures of the University of Michigan in March 1992 and supported in par by a grant from the Office of the Vice President for Research of the University of Michigan. The editor thanks these divisions of the University of Michigan for their interest and assistance.

Contents

John F. BailynThe Syntax and Semantics of Russian Long And Short Adjectives: An X’-Theoretic Account,...

Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics #22: The McMaster Meeting

Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics #23: The First Berkeley Meeting

Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics #24: The NYU Meeting 2015

Yohei Oseki, Masha Esipova, and Stephanie Harves, editors

This volume consists of 21 peer-reviewed, revised, and edited versions of papers presented at the twenty-fourth annual meeting of Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics, held at New York University May 7-10, 2015.

This volume consists of 16 peer-reviewed, revised, and edited versions of papers presented at the twenty-fifth annual meeting of Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics, held at Cornell University in May 2016.

Framework of Language

Jakobson, R.

[From the preface] With this volume, Michigan Studies in the Humanities inaugurates a series of books designed to promote cooperation among the various branches of the humanities by presenting perspectives on traditional problems of interpretation and evaluation. Though written by scholars firmly grounded in their special fields, these works will attempt to reach a wider audience by acknowledging problems confronted by the many branches of humanistic endeavor. At a time when scholars seem to speak to a narrower and narrower audience, it becomes essential that the common framework...

History: Another Text

All four writers living in socialist societies are engaged in searching for ways to preserve and express their personal and national identities and, at the same time, retain European values. As opposed to their western colleagues, these writers concede that in their countries literature has to take on all kinds of extraliterary roles. In other societies these may belong to the fields of sociology or psychology: in the socialist world it is prose literature that has to do the job. They all feel the responsibility...

History of Yugoslav Literature

Barac, A.

“Barac’s History of Yugoslav Literature…has served very well more than a generation of students in this country and remains the best short history of the Yugoslav literatures available in English.”
— Albert B. Lord, Harvard University

“The main purpose of this book I is to be an informative handbook, and it serves its purpose well. It is objective and convenient.”
— Thomas Eekman, U.C.L.A.

“We need books of this quality for all the East European countries. Barac was a distinguished scholar, he clearly enunciated the basic issues and themes in South Slavic literature...

In the Puppet Gardens: Selected Poems, 1963-2005

Wernisch, I.

The first extensive collection of Wernisch's verse to appear in English, drawing together more than one hundred poems from the whole course of Wernisch's career. From imagist haikus to long dramatic monologues, from nonsense verse to metaphysical meditation, from political grotesque to post-modern experiment, from folk songs to war poetry, Wernisch's work illustrates the poet's wide-ranging imagination, his...

Monumenta Bulgarica: A Bilingual Anthology of Bulgarian Texts from the 9th to the 19th Centuries

Butler, T.

Awarded a special book prize by the Bulgarian Studies Association for Outstanding Contribution to the Field of Bulgarian Studies at the 1998 AAASS Convention in Boca Raton, FL.

This excellent collection of monumental Bulgarian works, appearing both in the original Old Slavonic texts (of varying photocopy quality) and English translations, is welcome. Many of these documents have previously been accessible only to those few scholars who have thorough reading knowledge of Old Slavonic and are competent to sift through the maze of that ancient language’s orthographic and terminological...

Monumenta Polonica: The First Four Centuries of Polish Poetry

Carpenter, B.

The aim of the bilingual anthology is to present the finest poems written during the first four centuries of Polish poetry. This period begins with earliest Polish poetic text, "Bogurodzica" — the existing manuscript dates from 1407 though the poem was composed considerably earlier — and ends with poems written toward the end of the eighteenth century. These four hundred years saw a remarkable flowering of literature. The anthology is intended both for the genera reader interested in poetry, and also for the student of Polish literature. It is divided into four sections: the Middle ...

Piesn Niepodlegla: The Invincible Song--A Clandestine Anthology

Milosz, C.

Published in German-occupied Warsaw, this underground anthology of war poetry pays tribute to a spirit that, despite coercion and violence, remained both independent and invincible. That spirit moved the underground resistance but also expressed itself as a simple will for survival shared by the whole nation. The anthology reflects multifarious reactions to the war: at times a warrior’s song and a call to arms, it is also a complaint and cry of despair, a philosophical reflection and a reaffirmation of faith.

Divided into five sections, The Invincible Song follows the evolution...

Photography Sees the Surface

Sutnar, Ladislav and Funke, Jaromír

The volume revives a major contribution to modern Czech photography, originally published in 1935. It includes 14 full-page photographs by Funke, Josef Ehm, and their students at the progressively minded State Graphic School in Prague. Professorial explanatory notes by a variety of contemporary experts accompany these images. The project was driven by pedagogical considerations, and as such it reveals the wide reach of photography in education, scholarship and culture. An afterword by Matthew Witkovsky and Jindrich Toman sets this important publication into historical context for the...

Rybi Supiny/Fish Scales

Miller, Kelly and Brodska, Zdenka

Bohuslav Reynek (1892-1971) was a remarkable Czech poet, translator and artist, who published several collections of poetry in the interwar time. Branded a “Catholic” poet in the 1950’s, Reynek suffered for what actually was an idiosyncratic faith, expressed in language influenced by ancient and medieval religious literature and contemporary secular poetry. In the last years of his life, there was a resurgence of interest in his work that continues until today, as witnessed by recent French translations. The present edition is bilingual, and it incorporates graphics by the important...

Semiotics of Russian Culture

Lotman, J.M. and Uspenskij, B.A.

The Role of Dual Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture;
New Aspects in the Study of Early Russian Culture;
Echoes of the Notion “Moscow as the Third Rome”;
The Decembrist in Everyday Life;
“Agreement” and “Self-Giving” as Archetypal Models of Culture;
The Theater and Theatricality;
The Stage and Painting as Code Mechanisms;
The Pragmatics of Literary Character;
Reconstruction of the Plan and Ideo-Compositional Function;
The Poetics of Everyday Behavior;
Tsar and Pretender;
Why Should the Devil Speak Syriac? On the Origin of ...

Sign: Semiotics around the World

Bailey, R.W., Matejka, L. and Steiner, P.

Essays in this volume deal in various ways with the process of semiosis. For St. Augustine, the cardinal issue was in the divinity of sacred texts; for Locke, the philosophical consequences of the semiotic; for Freud, the assignment of tokens to sign systems in psychosis; for Eisenstein, the problem of composition uniting distinct systems in the cinema; for more recent theoreticians--Mukarovksy, Greimas, Lotman, and Kristeva--the natures of semiotics itself.

Though by no means exhausting the subject, the contributions published her do reveal the common concerns of past and present. Toward...

The Joy of Recognition: Selected Essays of Omry Ronen

Barry Scherr, Michael Wachtel

On November 1–2, 2013, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures organized a conference in memory of Omry Ronen (born July 12, 1937, Odessa, died November 1, 2012, Ann Arbor). The conference included papers given by his former students as well as an evening of recollections. During the conference many participants expressed their regret that Omry’s English-language essays were published in journals that are not easily accessible. Barry Scherr and I suggested that we put together a volume of this work, and Herbert Eagle and Jindrich Toman expressed their willingness to publish it as ...

The Queen's Court and Green Mountain Manuscripts With Other Forgeries of the Czech Revival

Edited and Translated by David L. Cooper

The present volume of MSP’s Czech Translations Series brings the first scholarly edition in English of the so-called Manuscripts, Czech literary forgeries of the early nineteenth century whose creation and reception represent one of the more remarkable episodes of Romantic forgery. The rich documentation here includes a selection of reviews and polemical articles that the Manuscripts provoked, showing their long term cultural significance and impact, including the central role they played in the development of Czech national consciousness. The annotated translation enables contemporary...

Yugoslav Literature 1945-1975: Thirty Years of Yugoslav Literature

Published under the auspices of The Joint Committee on Eastern Europe, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Science Research Council by Michigan Slavic Publications.

This book is written with a twofold aim: to provide information for the English reading public interested in Southeast European affairs, particularly in the cultural field; and to serve as a textbook for students of the Yugoslav literatures. In recent times, the history of these literatures has been presented in only one book in the English language: Antun Barac's Yugoslav Literature. This work, however, ...